With empanadas in the bar and candles flickering on the intimate tables that had replaced the usual Queen’s Hall seating, we could just about have been in a sultry Buenos Aires nightclub – well, maybe.

The one over-arching feeling in the air while Mark Knopfler played was a sense of quiet but powerful respectfulness.

LANA Del Rey was responsible for a rare moment of unwitting entertainment during this year’s particularly dull Brit Awards ceremony when she thanked her label for “helping turn my life into a work of art”.

EMMYLOU Harris and Rodney Crowell have been collaborators since he joined her Hot Band in 1975, but it is only with the release of their duets album, Old Yellow Moon, that they have formalised their double act and ostensibly share the billing on this tour.

“I KNOW what I like and I like what I know,” ran the chorus of sometime Genesis favourite I Know What I Like, one of the less meandering excursions by the classic English prog outfit to be given an outing at this show, and these words seemed to serve as a motto for the crowd here to see the band’s guitarist, Steve Hackett, perform.

AS EVIDENCED by this gig’s modest scale but capacity crowd, Ohio-born singer-songwriter Kim Richey has flown somewhat under the radar during most of her career, previously enjoying wider recognition as author of hits for the likes of Trisha Yearwood and Patty Loveless than as a performing artist.

FOLLOWING the fanfare surrounding the Zombies’ 2008 reunion to celebrate 40 years since their near-forgotten classic 1968 album Odessey and Oracle – shortly before the release of which the band had split, not anticipating its success – these sunshiny baroque-pop Englishmen keep on keeping on.

JOHN Grant is one of those blessed songwriters who can turn heads with just a phrase – generally colloquial, often witty, sometimes vicious and occasionally naughty – while beguiling with a beautiful melody and heart-wrenching delivery.

After an eight-year recording hiatus partially enforced by guitarist Ally McErlaine’s recovery from a brain aneurysm, it might be time to offer the largely critically unheralded Texas a spot of reappraisal.

When The Specials reformed a few years ago, the comeback concerts were, indeed, special, reflecting the band’s zeitgeist-capturing legacy for a generation of disenfranchised kids.

QUITE probably an excuse to plunder some atmospheric and out-of-copyright vocal samples, as they are a band seemingly destined for the long haul, pseudonymous duo J Willgoose Esq. (guitars, keyboards) and Wrigglesworth (drums) are nevertheless in charge of an imagination-grabbing archive retrieval turned pop music project.

FROM the moment Laura Mvula – strikingly pretty with her close-cropped hair, long eyelashes and beaming smile – sat down at a bright red electric piano, you got the feeling an hour in her company was going to be fun, and so it proved.

The fiddles were out and the tunes in the bar got started pretty much the minute the Shetland ferry left Aberdeen last Wednesday night, the 12-hour voyage serving as a time-honoured preamble to the islands’ world-famous annual four-day orgy of music-making.

Stop the clocks. It may be 2013 but, for a frenetic hour in King Tut’s, it might as well have been 1963, as a tight gang of Irish teens stormed through a nosebleed set of rhythm’n’blues standards and spot-the-difference originals with single-minded fidelity.

EX-HOBO “Seasick” Steve Wold, 72, has gone from homeless to a household name since his belated discovery circa 2006.

SINCE arriving in San Francisco 30 years ago, Chuck Prophet has garnered cult appreciation, first in influential alt.country outfit Green On Red, then as a solo artist with backing band the Mission Express, and now he is paying tribute to his adopted home city with current album Temple Beautiful.

Looking around the walls of the Ferry and taking in the many posters for upcoming tribute acts, it seemed that long-established blues guitarist Albert Lee was in good company.

IT IS understandable that a major label might want a piece of the renegade Death Grips action. This Sacramento-based hip-hop noise trio have proved to be prolific in the studio and incendiary on stage.

A WELL-DESERVED place on last week’s 2012 Scottish Album of the Year award long-list in his Human Don’t Be Angry guise says it all about the successful place Malcolm Middleton is currently at in his solo career, which has now run longer than that of the band with which he originally made his name – Arab Strap.

“Great to see you,” repeated Karl Wallinger twice as the main part of his set drew to a close, and rarely has such a typically throwaway greeting been delivered with such genuine relief and gratitude.